Ever since the People's Republic of China was founded in 1949,
official and unofficial spokesmen in the United States and Taiwan have
repeatedly charged that the Chinese Communists were exporting vast quantities of
heroin to earn much-needed foreign exchange. The leading American advocate of
this viewpoint was the former director of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN),
Harry Anslinger, who joined with Taiwanese officials in vigorously denouncing the People's Republic,
and as late as 1961 stated:
"One primary outlet for the Red Chinese traffic has been Hong Kong. Heroin made in Chinese factories out of poppies grown in China is smuggled into Hong Kong and onto freighters and planes to Malaya, Macao, the Philippines, the Hawaiian Islands, the United States, or, going the other direction, India, Egypt, Africa and Europe.
A prime 'target area' in the United States was California. The Los Angeles area alone probably received forty percent of the smuggled contraband from China's heroin and morphine plants. The syndicate crowd does not object to dealing with the Reds, as long as the profits are big in terms of dollars." (230)
While Anslinger has retired from the field, Taiwan officials have continued the attack. In February of 1971 the Free China Weekly reported:
"Red China exported some US $800 million worth of narcotics last year. Plantings of poppies are said to be on the increase in Yunnan, whence raw opium moves into the free world via Laos, Burma, and Thailand....
Formerly the mainland exported only opium. Recently some 30 processing plants have been established. Narcotics are now moved out in the less bulky, more profitable form of heroin, morphine and other opium derivatives." (231)
Since all of these accusations name Burma or Hong Kong as the transit point for narcotics from the People's Republic, examination of the traffic in these two areas seems to be the most logical means of confirming or denying these reports.
British customs and police officials consulted in Hong Kong regard the charges as ridiculous and completely unfounded. When the assistant chief preventive officer (equivalent to an American customs official), Mr. Graham Crookdake, was questioned in a recent interview about China's role in the traffic, he responded:
"We've never had a single seizure from China since 1949 and I've been here since 1947. We have customs posts out on the boundary and the search is quite strict. There is only one road and one rail connection so it is quite easy to control." (232)
Although the chaotic situation in the Shan States makes it almost impossible for any outside observer to visit the Burma-China borderlands to investigate the matter, the Shan rebel groups (usually conservative, Christian, and monarchist) who control these areas maintain headquarters in northern Thailand. The authors interviewed four of these leaders in the summer of 1971, and they all asserted that there are absolutely no opium caravans crossing the border into the Shan States from China. Adrian Cowell, a film producer for British television, traveled through the Shan States for five months during 1964-1965 and reported in his television documentary that the rebel leaders "are certain that no Chinese convoys come through their region." (233)
Many of these rebels were employed by the CIA to patrol the Burma-China border or to cross into China on long-range intelligence patrols. From 1962 until 1967 a CIA agent named William Young directed these operations from a secret base in northwestern Laos, and during these five years he never discovered any evidence that opium was coming out of China. Although the border was porous enough for his teams to penetrate after careful planning, it was much too tightly guarded by militia and regular army troops for petty smugglers to travel back and forth with any frequency. In any case, his intelligence teams learned that the Chinese had transformed the patterns of hill tribe agriculture, and opium was no longer a major crop in Yunnan. (234)
Most significantly, now that Mr. Anslinger has retired, the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics has changed its point of view. In a recent report the bureau concluded that there had been two major postwar upheavals in the international opium trade, 'one of which was "the rapid suppression of China's illicit production" in the mid 1950s. (235) Today many federal narcotics agents are openly bitter toward Anslinger for what they now consider to have been the abuse of the bureau's name for the purposes of blatant, inaccurate propaganda. One agent serving in Southeast Asia said in a mid 1971 interview,
Everytime Anslinger spoke anywhere he always said the same thing-"The Chicoms are flooding the world with dope to corrupt the youth of America." . . . It was kind of like the "Marijuana rots your brains" stuff the old FBN put out. It really destroyed our credibility and now nobody believes us. There was no evidence for Anslinger's accusations, but that never stopped him.
How, then, do we account for Taiwan's persistence in damning the People's Republic for its alleged involvement in the narcotics trade? Mr. John Warner, chief of the Bureau of Narcotics' Strategic Intelligence Office, offers this explanation:
Recently we have been getting a number of Congressional inquiries about Chinese Communist involvement in the opium trade. The Taiwanese floated a series of nonattributable articles in the right wing press, quoting statements from British police officers in Hong Kong saying "we have seized five tons of opiates in Hong Kong this year." And the article would then state that this came from Red China. Actually it comes from Bangkok. The real object of this sudden mushrooming of this kind of propaganda is to bar China from the U.N. (236)